Birmingham Protests
and the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," April 1963

"I Have a
Dream" Speech and the March on Washington, August 1963

Nobel Prize, December
1964

Assassination,
4 April 1968

by
Clayborne Carson

One
of the world's best known advocates of non-violent social change strategies,
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., synthesized ideas drawn from many different
cultural traditions. Born in Atlanta on January 15, 1929, King's roots
were in the African-American Baptist church. He was the grandson of the
Rev. A. D. Williams, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist church and a founder of
Atlanta's NAACP chapter, and the son of Martin Luther King, Sr., who succeeded
Williams as Ebenezer's pastor and also became a civil rights leader. Although,
from an early age, King resented religious emotionalism and questioned
literal interpretations of scripture, he nevertheless greatly admired
black social gospel proponents such as his father who saw the church as
a instrument for improving the lives of African Americans. Morehouse College
president Benjamin Mays and other proponents of Christian social activism
influenced King's decision after his junior year at Morehouse to become
a minister and thereby serve society. His continued skepticism, however,
shaped his subsequent theological studies at Crozer Theological Seminary
in Chester, Pennsylvania, and at Boston University, where he received
a doctorate in systematic theology in 1955. Rejecting offers for academic
positions, King decided while completing his Ph. D. requirements to return
to the South and accepted the pastorate of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church
in Montgomery, Alabama.

On December 5, 1955, five days after Montgomery civil rights activist
Rosa Parks refused to obey the city's rules mandating segregation on buses,
black residents launched a bus boycott and elected King as president of
the newly-formed Montgomery Improvement Association. As the boycott continued
during 1956, King gained national prominence as a result of his exceptional
oratorical skills and personal courage. His house was bombed and he was
convicted along with other boycott leaders on charges of conspiring to
interfere with the bus company's operations. Despite these attempts to
suppress the movement, Montgomery bus were desegregated in December, 1956,
after the United States Supreme Court declared Alabama's segregation laws
unconstitutional.

In
1957, seeking to build upon the success of the Montgomery boycott movement,
King and other southern black ministers founded the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC). As SCLC's president, King emphasized the goal of black
voting rights when he spoke at the Lincoln Memorial during the 1957 Prayer
Pilgrimage for Freedom. During 1958, he published his first book, Stride
Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. The following year, he toured India,
increased his understanding of Gandhian non-violent strategies. At the end
of 1959, he resigned from Dexter and returned to Atlanta where the SCLC
headquarters was located and where he also could assist his father as pastor
of Ebenezer.

Although increasingly portrayed as the pre-eminent black spokesperson, King
did not mobilize mass protest activity during the first five years after
the Montgomery boycott ended. While King moved cautiously, southern black
college students took the initiative, launching a wave of sit-in protests
during the winter and spring of 1960. King sympathized with the student
movement and spoke at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) in April 1960, but he soon became the target of criticisms
from SNCC activists determined to assert their independence. Even King's
decision in October, 1960, to join a student sit-in in Atlanta did not allay
the tensions, although presidential candidate John F. Kennedy's sympathetic
telephone call to King's wife, Coretta Scott King, helped attract crucial
black support for Kennedy's successful campaign. The 1961 "Freedom
Rides," which sought to integrate southern transportation facilities,
demonstrated that neither King nor Kennedy could control the expanding protest
movement spearheaded by students. Conflicts between King and younger militants
were also evident when both SCLC and SNCC assisted the Albany (Georgia)
Movement's campaign of mass protests during December of 1961 and the summer
of 1962.

After achieving few of his objectives in Albany, King recognized the need
to organize a successful protest campaign free of conflicts with SNCC. During
the spring of 1963, he and his staff guided mass demonstrations in Birmingham,
Alabama, where local white police officials were known from their anti-black
attitudes. Clashes between black demonstrators and police using police dogs
and fire hoses generated newspaper headlines through the world. In June,
President Kennedy reacted to the Birmingham protests and the obstinacy of
segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace by agreed to submit broad
civil rights legislation to Congress (which eventually passed the Civil
Rights Act of 1964). Subsequent mass demonstrations in many communities
culminated in a march on August 28, 1963, that attracted more than 250,000
protesters to Washington, D. C. Addressing the marchers from the steps of
the Lincoln Memorial, King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream"
oration.

During the year following the March, King's renown grew as he became Time
magazine's Man of the Year and, in December 1964, the recipient of the Nobel
Peace Prize. Despite fame and accolades, however, King faced many challenges
to his leadership. Malcolm X's (1927-1965) message of self-defense and black
nationalism expressed the discontent and anger of northern, urban blacks
more effectively than did King's moderation. During the 1965 Selma to Montgomery
march, King and his lieutenants were able to keep intra-movement conflicts
sufficiently under control to bring about passage of the 1965 Voting Rights
Act, but while participating in a 1966 march through Mississippi, King encountered
strong criticism from "Black Power" proponent Stokely Carmichael.
Shortly afterward white counter-protesters in the Chicago area physically
assaulted King in the Chicago area during an unsuccessful effort to transfer
non-violent protest techniques to the urban North. Despite these leadership
conflicts, King remained committed to the use of non-violent techniques.
Early in 1968, he initiated a Poor Peoples campaign designed to confront
economic problems that had not been addressed by early civil rights reforms.

King's
effectiveness in achieving his objectives was limited not merely by divisions
among blacks, however, but also by the increasing resistance he encountered
from national political leaders. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's already
extensive efforts to undermine King's leadership were intensified during
1967 as urban racial violence escalated and King criticized American intervention
in the Vietnam war. King had lost the support of many white liberals, and
his relations with the Lyndon Johnson administration were at a low point
when he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, while seeking to assist a garbage
workers' strike in Memphis. After his death, King remained a controversial
symbol of the African-American civil rights struggle, revered by many for
his martyrdom on behalf of non-violence and condemned by others for his
militancy and insurgent views.